🤔 What's so special about the LS? | TECHNICALLY SPEAKING |

what's so special about the LS how many times have you heard the term LS swap what is it that makes the LS so popular with drag racers hot rodders and drifters alike there has to be a reason this particular engine is so many people's favorite so let's strip it down and take a look [Music] back in January 1995 that LS was introduced as a clean sheet designed by Chevrolet and since then the LS series of engines has been a firm favorite performance engineer om applications and as the ever-popular LS swap while chef certainly didn't invent the v8 engine the classic small-block Chevy was and still is such a popular engine that the brand's almost synonymous with the term v8 Shevchuk the literal decades of knowledge learned in producing the small-block Chevy and applied that to the LS however there wasn't much carried over from the old v8 to the new basically rod bearings lifters and bore spacing are about the only things the two engines have in common unlike Fords long and tall Baro engine that we did it what's so special on a little while back the LS is a relatively small and relatively light engine this is because of the old-school push rod design most modern performance engines utilize an overhead camshaft design which can certainly help the engine breathe however it does add extra height weight and complexity especially when the engines in a V configuration if we take a look at something like Ford's coyote engine or even Toyota's one you said the top of the LS is a way more compact design this is the reason why they're so popular for engine conversions because they fit in practically anything the LS was first introduced in the 1997 Corvette and since then GM's been shoving them in every vehicle they could find from trucks to Camaros and everything in between including our Australian Holden Commodore that means there's plenty to go around they're not that expensive but the price is on the rise and there's a whole lot of after sales support forum so what should you be looking for when you're buying your LS engine well not that much to be honest lifter problems seem to be reasonably common and a normally seen in older engines or engines with a high lift camshaft or engines that have been absolutely thrashed without regular servicing if you hear an odd top-end knock mixed with a weeds squeak the engines going to need attention check the oil pressure first make sure it's got some if it has got oil pressure odds are the engines just gonna need a set of lifters but get onto this quickly that noise is metal-on-metal carnage and it will be doing damage should you get one well the answer is absolutely if you want to make some good power good torque and fit in just about any engine bay you really can't go past the LS sure you'll cop a few not another LS swap comments but hey your car will be running and there's probably won't be which variant should use well it all depends on what you can get your hands on all variants of the LS are a really good option lower the case the better there's huge aftermarket support for the LS series and most parts like cranks rods Pistons camshaft stud kits and gaskets are available off-the-shelf and overnight [Music] now once you've selected the type of LS that you're going to be using it's mounted in your project you're gonna need engine management and that's where we can help how thick have gone to a huge amount of trouble to make a whole bunch of terminated harness kits to suit LS one variants LS two variants cable style throttle electronic style throttles so we've done all the hard work so you don't have to so let me show you what I'm talking about firstly the elite 2500 series ECU so this is the unit this is the brains of the operation this is the one that will do sequential injection so what'll fire eight injectors individually it'll do direct fire ignition meaning it fires each coil individually can make advantage of your factory auto motor or an electronic throttle body and works with all of your factory sensors including your NOC sensors next the LS terminated engine harness don't worry I know it looks scary everything's labeled it's all pretty straightforward in addition to the factory centers on the LS one of the things that I really like to add is a dual channel wideband controller that looks like this what happens here is another one of our kin expansion systems so this is supplied with a cable that plugs straight from here into the same port that we use for a - or a thermocouple system something like that and we do make little double adapters so you can plug a whole bunch of stuff in at once then it's simply got to cable links that we call flying lead so an LSU four point nine oxygen sensor would plug into each side then would go into each exhaust system so one for bank one one for bank two that way you can do banked Oh to corrections and you can make sure that each side of the engine is running equally we have done a video before of a full wire up of how to put a terminated engine harness across onto an LS so I'll put that link in the comments below so you can have a bit of a look through that I'm not going to be doing that again today instead I want to get into it and I want to pull this thing down and see what's so magic about it now we're at the fun bit where I get to pull this LS apart thanks very much to our mates out war speed who've donated the engine it did come into the shop for a rebuild anyway so I'll be stripping it down admittedly I've already pulled a heap of stuff already off it and cleaned everything and then put it back together for the video today just so don't rip oil all over the place and so that you guys can see it all happen a little bit faster this is an LS one cable throttle variant of the engine so what I plan on doing is pulling everything apart bit by bit having a bit of a look we'll get all the way down to the bottom hopefully in through the timing cover case and see what's inside first bit pretty straightforward we'll just take the throttle body off and the intake manifold so we're just taking the throttle body off one of the things I did want to show you in case you sort are not aware of it when you're pressing the throttle in your car a cable pulls on this which in turn opens this valve which in turns lets more or less air into the engine and that's how we regulate the engines power once we've opened the throttle the air goes in through the inlet manifold and then gets directed down to each of the eight cylinders on this v8 we've got eight injectors one injector per cylinder that fires straight down into the inlet port and we've got our fuel rails sitting on top that supply fuel at a base fuel pressure of forty or fifty or sixty pounds of pressure into the back side of the injector and then the engine management system pulses that injector to spray certain amounts of fuel into the engine the beauty of the LS engine is that a lot of this stuff is modular so at the moment we've got a throttle position sensor and our idle air control motor housed in one unit here so we don't need to do any extra mounting work there to remote mount anything we've got our manifold pressure sensor hanging off the back of the inlet manifold already done nice and easy it's got our fuel rails over the top this engine is a returnless style fuel system so it's got a fuel dampener up the top here don't be confused I think it's a fuel pressure regulator it's a dampener we've got our feed into the rails and then we've just got a valve at the front here that's used sometimes to check fuel pressure we can see all of our Inlet ports have two cylinder heads our valley cover down the middle here we've got a cam sensor our oil pressure sensor and our two knock sensors so I'll pop those knock sensors out so that's what the two knock sensors look like they also hold the valley cover down as well as a whole bunch of bolts now that the inlet manifold and the valley cover are off we can look down inside where the knock sensor mounted you can actually see the single camshaft right down the bottom a bit unusual for us overhead cam guys to see a single camshaft down the bottom of the engine we've got the cam gear across the front here we've actually that cam sent a sink on the backside here so we'll keep stripping the thing down and we will eventually get to the cam shaft but it is interesting to see that not mounted in the cylinder head where our overhead cam is okay next we'll pop the rocker covers off we'll pull the cylinder heads off I'll clean up the workbench a little bit so we can keep moving things down the line now it's probably a good time to point out all these witness marks on the cylinder heads where the intake manifolds being bolted on down the bottom we can see the gasket where it's kind of sealed and everything's cool up the top you you can actually see the marks where this thing what they call match porting is where you would use a grinder and grind out this shape so that the inlet manifold going in is the same size as the inlet port so I don't know on this particular engine whether it's actually worth it or necessary to do but if you hear someone talking about match porting the cylinder head to the intake manifold that's what they're talking about with the rocker cover pulled off what we can see here we can see all of our rockers along the top we can see our valve springs we can see our valve spring retainers we can see the valve stem down the middle there we can see the push rod we'll get to those in a sec down the middle we can see that single camshaft but we're missing a whole bunch of valves on this side of the engine per cylinder it's only two valves so on our late-model hi-tech stuff we talked about four valves per cylinder and that's high reving high tech huge horsepower all that stuff weight this thing has got a single camshaft and it's got two valves per cylinder and it's got push rods and it makes bulk horsepower it just goes to show you don't need to reinvent everything this thing works have a go at this thing so that's a push rod what happens here is that we've got a camshaft that's running down the center of an engine we've got a hydraulic lifter a thing that basically buffers between the camshaft and this thing it sits in front of the engine here as the camshaft spins around which rod goes up and down then presses on this thing the rocker which in turn then presses up and down on the top of the valve spring compressor up on top of it on top of the valve compresses the valve spring pushes the valve down and that's how we get our valve timing so keep in mind we've normally got one push rod per valve per valve spring and per Rock but in this particular case I've already taken all the push rods out simply because I wanted to spin the engine over and I didn't want to have to act against all the valve springs in a normal case you certainly wouldn't be doing this [Music] now that we've got the cylinder head on the bench we can see that we've got our intake port and if we look down in through the intake port you can actually see the inlet valve which is mated to this foul spring and this valve retainer on the exhaust side we've got this fun another exhaust valve you can put your finger here and you can actually feel the exhaust valve on the inside of the cylinder head and then this is the exhaust port let's now pick it up and we'll flip it over and the bottom of the cylinder head we can see that we've got our four cylinders on this bank of the v8 we've got our exhaust valve which is the smaller valve we've got our intake valve which is the bigger one we've got our head gasket mating surface and we've also got a thread directly into each cylinder that's what the spark plug [Music] so if you've heard any inmates talking about a head gasket or more importantly a blown head gasket what a head gasket is is this thing so this is a multi-layered gasket I don't know whether we can get that in there and basically what this thing does we plug that down put our cylinder head on top we we talked it down with head studs or head bolts and it seals the compression from each cylinder onto the cylinder head as well as sealing these galleries that come through the top to allow our water and oil to get up into the cylinder head and then also to drain back out into the engine so it is a gasket it's just a really important gasket the next step is pretty similar we're just going to pull this other cylinder head off everything looks about the same as the other side just memory imaged but I'm just going to pull it off so it makes the thing easier to turn over on the on the engine stand so we can have a look at the bottom end now that thing flipped over or pull the sump off and we'll get a better look at the begins and manes and what's going on underneath while we're here though harmonic balance up some of you guys might have noticed it's sticking out a little bit further normal that's because I spent all morning with a pool of getting the thing off surprisingly difficult if you are gonna try and pull the harmonic balancer off one of these things make sure that you've got the right tool to pull the thing off so our one it's super easy like that but it did take us a while to get there [Music] here we go that's the sample one of the things you will notice is so this is the oil pickup comes from the oil pump that's a crank driven the oil pickup sits down in this hole nobody's baffled in their quiet nicely so the next step is we'll pull the oil pickup pretty straightforward so that's got like a gauze in there that stops it from picking up ginormous chunks of stuff but the reality is if you've got stuff in your medic like in your sump that's that be you've got bigger problems anyway it's an o-ring here that seats in the bottom little pump and we will be taking the front and motor off as well and have a look at the oil part so we'll pop this to this side as well well flick on over and we'll just take the last bolt out of that we need to tray here and then we can see how it all ticks no matter how much you clean one of these things more oil just keeps on coming out of it so it's not until it goes through like a hot wash bath that it's actually clean and you get rid of this horrible smell the lower section of the LS is a wire block design and incorporates deep side skirts along with six bolt cross-multiply earring caps this is what the engineers at GM call a snap fit cross bolt design and it provides really good crankshaft and block rigidity so the bottom ends pretty strong we've got our ring gear on the backside here one of the things that you don't often see is the trigger system so this is the thing for the engine management system that tells the ECU how fast the engine is turning and at what position it's at so here's all the teeth that we're looking at around the outside here the position sensor is this thing just here so as the crankshaft turns around these wheels turn around at the same rate and give us all the information stock bottom end of this sync crankshaft rods and pistons the stock bottom end challenge for an LS is a big deal these things are making 800 horsepower at the wheels comfortably on the stock bottom end so all this stuff is very strong from the factory now this is about as far as we're gonna go stripping the bottom in we're not gonna pull the mains and begin caps off but I do want to take the front of the engine off have a look at the oil pump assembly and have a look at the timing chain and you set up [Music] now we've got the oil pump this student off the crankshaft and we've got the can gear can shaft behind that and the crank pulley behind here so let's pull the oil pump off here we go and this is one of the things as a Nissen guy this is one of the things that I love about the LS look at that drive how many edges how many teeth it's got basically in to our oil pump here so how this works it's crank driven so as this thing spins around that compresses our oil picks it up through the pickup that we saw before in the sump spits it out through the gallery and oil pressure into the engine the collar that we've got here there's so many edges for it to catch whereas say a Nissan RB for example has only got the two edges that rattle there's one of the biggest problems with that engine this engine definitely doesn't suffer from that further in here we've got our cam gear the bigger gear and then our crank sprocket and our timing chain on the bottom here a little bit loose because again because we've got the push rods out that's why the camshaft can move around a little bit in there so normally that would be nice and tight and that's all that's inside your LS engine not a lot it's super simple not a whole lot of parts there's not a huge amount of gaskets I can really understand why people like these things well guys we've got to the bottom of this engine which means that we've got to the end of the episode I hope you've enjoyed watching as much as I've enjoyed pulling this thing apart if any of you guys have got an engine lying around at home that you'd like me to pull apart and destroyed by all means give us a call and we'll organize it but for now I got to figure out how to put this thing back together and send it back to war speed see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Haltech

Views: 471,243

Keywords: haltech, what's so special, how ls engine works, tuning fork explains, ls swap explained, chevy ls engine teardown, how good is the ls3 engine, best ecu for ls swap, best ecu for ls engine, best ecu for ls turbo, ls wiring harness, ls wiring harness stand alone, chevy lsx engine, best chevy ls engine for swap, best chevy engine to build, best chevy engine for hot rod, ls engine tuning software, ls engine, gm ls engine, whats so special

Id: wMZG7nFx-2M

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DAFROZENCHOSEN1]

That it can be shoved into literally anything.

[u/[deleted]]

Light

Shitload of aftermarket support

Doesn’t take too much to get power outta them

I want to keep my car period correct as I restore it ,but its hard not to want to grab a 6.0 and fresh it and throw in my impala.

[u/sohcgt96]

I'd almost venture some of it is because of their massive availability, the computers are friendly to work with, and they're WAY lighter and more compact than rival engines.

Internet folks sometimes bag on LS swaps because they're so common but the fact is, they're common because they work well. Quite honestly are the objectively better option in the majority of cases if you look at cost, power, reliability, and availability.

[u/TeamJim]

It's overall an incredibly engineered motor. "Y" block, 6 bolt mains, long head bolts, etc.

What really sets it apart is the heads. Stock LS1 heads flow nearly as well as NASCAR heads did at the time.

[u/SopaDeMolhoShoyu]

Simple, light, small, powerful, well designed...the LS is a great engine overall.